Recent articles

Opinion

Late in the last century, the Treasury Department redesigned our currency. In the process, the portraits got makeovers. Modern Ben has been shampooing with Rogaine, and retouched Andy looks more like an “after” ad for glycolic acid treatments than Old Hickory.

Columns

Black Friday shoppers are sentimentalists. Those with true holiday spirit shop online at work on Monday instead of doing their jobs. Others who’d miss elbowing their neighbors in the checkout line abandon hearth and home on Thanksgiving, forsaking November’s holiday to begin shopping for December’s holiday.

Opinion

At school we too often cater to the loudest, most aberrant, most irrational voices and demands. We take our off-campus marching orders from experts who are strangers to the classrooms where their theoretical buck actually stops.

Opinion

While classroom teachers grapple with passing along the knowledge and skill that make a nation educated, experts are helping, too. According to these twenty-first century big thinkers, in the brave new world of global competition, “furniture should be considered as seriously as instruction.”

Opinion

Education experts propose eliminating homework. They denounce it as a “horrible” burden that doesn’t help students learn. They charge that schools have increasingly heaped busy work on American children, and that homework constitutes an “undemocratic” “outrage” that “deforms” family life.

Opinion

For decades I’ve shaken my head at the madness of education reform. From pipedreams like letting ten-year-olds design their own educations to reducing the number of students who fail by outlawing F’s, from costly “authentic assessments” that yield meaningless data to “alternative” programs that lower dropout rates by reclassifying part-time jobs as “school,” from simultaneously “raising standards” and guaranteeing success...

Opinion

Little Poor Elijah invented an imaginary friend named Hand. Mostly Hand was invisible, but on less mystic occasions he bore a striking resemblance to the miniature fingers and thumb residing at the end of Poor Elijah’s arm.

Opinion

When I was growing up, “bedlam” meant noisy and chaotic, as in “Hey, it’s like Bedlam down there,” commonly shouted by my father from the top of the stairs. I later learned that Bedlam was a London asylum. Its corridors echoed with shrieks of madness and the mutterings of fevered minds.

Opinion

At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, a woman outside Independence Hall asked Benjamin Franklin if the delegates had created a monarchy or a republic. “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”